


to choose you, a thousand times

by ryssabeth



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: M/M, Marriage, Post-Series, Wedding, Wedding Night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 18:57:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6532240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryssabeth/pseuds/ryssabeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Are you sure this is something you want?” Laurent has been dancing around this question for ages now. It is congruous with his style that he asks it while in their marriage bed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to choose you, a thousand times

**Author's Note:**

> you could tell me that damen doesn't bottom on their wedding night but you'd also have to fight me

There is a glow within his body, stretching from the crown of his head to the tips of his toes. It couples with the dull ache at the base of his spine, the delicate soreness of having been—of having a person inside—of being beneath a man moments before, for the first time. It is not an unwanted or disturbing sort of pair, and quite honestly there is a deep satisfaction humming beneath his skin as he presses up against Laurent, seeking an outer warmth to bring him into a drowsy balance.

“This might seem like a poorly timed question,” Laurent speaks with no preamble, which isn’t odd for him. He often has conversations with himself, many paces outward, before he says anything aloud. It’s a symptom of planning, Damen has come to find.

“I’m used to those from you,” Damen replies as if thoroughly sated. It is, of course, a lie. There is never enough of Laurent in his system. It’s something that has taken a while to accept—between himself, and his associates. “Proceed.”

Laurent’s nose wrinkles, and a familiar stirring in his chest rises at the sight of it. The short-lived drowsiness slips from his shoulder in pieces.

“Are you sure marrying me is what you want?”

“I have wanted nothing more in my life.” A confession. Had any of his people heard it, they would be bemused, but unsurprised. It feels heavier than it is, probably. But then, it has always felt heavy, and he has known it much longer than now.

( _a kingdom, or this._ )

“Besides,” he continues, rolling onto his stomach, the soreness arcing back up his spine as he muffles a groan into a pillow. “We are already wed.”

Laurent’s fingers are gentle when they trace over Damen’s back, leaving fluttering touches. The hairs rise at the base of his skull and along his arms.

“Yes,” Laurent says before he pauses, and if he strains himself, Damen can almost feel Laurent’s breath against his spine, as if he were leaning down to press a kiss there. He is by no means leaning, currently. But there are memories of their wedding night, still yet to be over, dancing around in his head. The comfortable silence is broken by, “but there are scars on your back.”

“Ah,” Damen hums into the pillow. It’s smells like Laurent. “I hadn’t known. You see, I cannot lay eyes upon my own back.”

Laurent does not find him funny. Damen is almost certain this is because he has been spending too much time with Nikandros and makes a mental note to address this at a later time. “I almost killed you,” Laurent tells him, before pausing again, as if Damen were unaware, and it is then that he is _absolutely_ certain he has been spending too much time with Nikandros. Or that he has too much time alone. And then, “Often.”

“An exciting courtship.”

Damen lifts his head slightly from the pillow to meet eyes that are too beautiful for description. Were he a poet in another life, perhaps he would fare better.

(A poet and a man with a former love of books. That would have been something.

But this is also something, and Damen treasures it.)

Laurent regards him and Damen smiles. Something melts on Laurent’s face. “Has anyone ever told you how stupid you are?”

His smile widens, just a little. He can feel the stretch of it against his lips. “Oh yes,” Damen says, watching Laurent’s lashes kiss his cheeks when he blinks. “You, for instance.” A pause, mirroring Laurent only moments before. “Often.”

Laurent doesn’t find that funny either. “I can’t undo what I’ve done,” he tells him, insistently. His fingers ghost another path over the scars that he had ordered put there. The tips of them are callused, unsurprisingly.

“I know,” Damen admits, because he does. This is something he has lived with, something he was living with when he’d fallen in love, something that he was living with when he’d saved Laurent’s life the first time. It is not new information, nor is it important. “But I can forgive you for it, which is a similar venture.”

Moonlight catches on Laurent’s skin, pales it further, though the Akielon—the Veretian—the Center’s sun has baked him, a little. His eyelashes glitter like stars when he blinks. Damen’s golden cuff tingles against the skin of his own wrist. “It isn’t the same thing at all.”

“It is very much a similar thing.” Damen props himself up, watching as Laurent leans from his sitting position as if by gravity rather than by his own consideration. They could kiss at any moment. “I choose to forgive you. I choose to be your husband, and to make you mine. I choose to do what I want, when I want to, carefully, because if I did not do so, you would have attempted to talk me out of it sooner. Perhaps I did not choose to love you, but I did choose to go through with it, to pursue you, to court you. I did choose to say I loved you. And I choose, with every breath, to be here.”

The smile that touches Laurent’s mouth attempts to be fleeting. It is not successful. “You prepared for this conversation?”

“I prepared for this conversation weeks ago.”

“It seems that learning is not beyond you.”

“Truly,” Damen agrees, “I am not beyond teaching.”

When Laurent touches his back this time, it is to push his palm up the ridge of Damen’s spine with the undisguised force of _intent_. His fingers tremble. There are still some things that he is not comfortable asking for, without the solid weight of touch to ground him.

“Nor am I.” Laurent clears his throat around the words and flush rises into the apples of his cheeks. “And I wonder if you would let me,” he pauses, swallows, flushes deeper. “I wonder if you would _let me_ …”

Damen waits. It is something that he has become surprisingly good at.

Laurent huffs, bouncing the gold on his head. “I wonder if you would let me take you again. Or—is that the—the phrasing is a little—“

There is only so much suffering Damen can bear to watch, for all that it endears him to the marrow of his bones, and so he curls his fingers against the back of Laurent’s neck and brushes their noses, leaning up to do so. And he says, “as many times as you like, whenever you like. I would deny you very little.” He can feel a similar warmth rising in his own cheeks, can feel it bubbling in his chest, can feel—

“Besides,” he continues, speaking softly against Laurent’s mouth, even as the urge to kiss him becomes overwhelming, “I am surprised by how much I enjoy you inside me.”

“It is a euphoric feeling,” Laurent breathes, “isn’t it?”

( _it’s never like this_.)

“To love you?” Damen says, just as breathless. “Yes.”

“To love _you_ ,” Laurent replies, not to be outdone. “Yes.”

They kiss because they can avoid it no longer.

(It’s the inevitability of things, you see. That is how it has always been between them.

Inevitable. Beautiful. Cosmic.)

In another life, maybe everything this is would have taken less time.

But this life? This life is just as good, just as worth living.

He does, after all, have Laurent.


End file.
